THEATER REVIEW

By BEN BRANTLEY

Published: October 22, 2002

Correction Appended

To say that Al Pacino is giving the performance of his career at the moment is not to say that he is giving his best performance ever. What is true is that in the splashy, star-packed new revival of Bertolt Brecht's ''Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,'' Mr. Pacino sometimes seems to be channeling most of his more celebrated roles. It's as if his entire professional life were passing before your eyes in a series of juicy, iconographic acting bites.

Remember Mr. Pacino's wasted, wacked-out drug lord in ''Scarface''? His increasingly Marlo Brando-ized mafia capo in the ''Godfather'' films? His satanic attorney in ''The Devil's Advocate''? And, above all, his personal take on Shakespeare's crookback king in the documentary film ''Searching for Richard''?

Flashes of these portraits in celluloid illuminate the National Actors Theater's production of Brecht's long-winded fable about fascist tyranny in vicious old Chicago, staged by the British director Simon McBurney at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University.

Be grateful that Mr. Pacino, in the title role of a Hitlerian thug who conquers the cauliflower business, arrives equipped with this built-in animated scrapbook. And that he can translate its elements into such viscerally theatrical terms.

For the truth is that ''Arturo Ui,'' which was written in the early 1940's during Brecht's European exile from Nazi Germany, has never been an exciting play. Yes, it features dazzlingly sordid, throat-slitting goons like those of ''The Threepenny Opera'' and some witty bits of music-hall-style violence. But it is also a numbingly detailed and literal-minded allegory, cluttered with descriptions of business transactions that parallel events in Hitler's road to power.

First staged in 1958, it's a work that brings out the more patience-taxing aspects suggested by the term epic theater, even with high-voltage actors like Christopher Plummer (1963) and John Turturro (1991) as the charismatically loutish Ui.

This latest version unfolds as a neck-and-neck race between the tedium of the material and the entertaining chutzpah of its presentation.

By the end, tedium has won by a nose, but it's not for want of plenty of bright and brazen showmanship along the way.

''Arturo Ui,'' which runs through Nov. 3, generated plenty of publicity before it opened. The cast promised to be an acting connoisseur's delight of idiosyncratic manhood, with, for starters, Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Chazz Palminteri, Billy Crudup and Charles Durning supporting Mr. Pacino. Experimental theater fans were salivating over the participation of Mr. McBurney, the artistic director of the wondrous Complicite company of London (''Street of Crocodiles,'' ''Mnemonic'').

Then there was the little matter of price: $115 (which includes a mandatory $50 membership fee for the National Actors Theater), $15 more than the highest regular ticket price on Broadway. What's more, the producers originally planned not to invite critics, saying the show was still a work in progress.

In fact, there remains a work-in-progress roughness about this ''Arturo Ui.'' Mr. McBurney's disciplined, formal style, which asks performers to step in and out of their human identities, is eminently suited to that famous Brechtian alienation effect.

But it poses demands that American actors known for their freewheeling spontaneity can't always meet. Aside from Mr. Pacino, only Mr. Buscemi, a veteran of the avant-garde rigors of the Wooster Group, and a hilariously angular Linda Emond, of ''Homebody/Kabul,'' are entirely successful in sustaining the electrified artificiality that's required.

Similarly, wit and virtuosity, which appropriately mix sinister shadows and clinical clarity, are often evident in the work of the exceptionally gifted technical team -- which includes Robert Innes Hopkins (set and costumes) and Ruppert Bohle (projections), as well as the Complicite veterans Paul Anderson (lighting), Christopher Shutt (sound) and Christina Cunningham (costumes).

Yet because ''Arturo Ui'' works with such a crowded canvas, too much fancy stagecraft can make it hard to understand. It's a can't-win situation, since the play becomes either hard to follow (with diversionary visuals) or hard to swallow (with a straightforward presentation of a medicinal lecture). The projection here of supertitles to annotate what's happening onstage with descriptions of what was happening in Nazi Germany (the Reichstag fire, the invasion of Poland) inevitably smacks of the lecture hall.

Brecht had specific instructions for staging ''Ui.'' The show's pace, he advised, must be ''at top speed.'' And it should have ''obvious hark-backs to the Elizabethan Theater.''

If Mr. McBurney's ''Ui'' still drags quite a bit more than a speeding bullet, the production consistently brings out the play's Elizabethan aspects. George Tabori's bold adaptation of the original text explicitly evokes Shakespearean verse, blank and rhymed, and neatly sets off the work's many references to tragedies from ''Hamlet'' to ''Julius Caesar.''

Correction: October 23, 2002, Wednesday A theater review yesterday about ''The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui'' with Al Pacino in the title role misstated the name of a film he starred in and directed. It is ''Looking for Richard,'' not ''Searching for Richard.''